If your office hasn’t yet made the transition, now is a great time to finally do it. MicroMD offers medical software solutions for managing electronic health records (EHR) while the following tips help prepare your office for the transition:

• Realize the transition is going to take time and plan accordingly. No medical office ever went paperless overnight. In fact, the average office usually takes about six months to fully transition. It helps to take a phased approach to ensure the office staff is trained and comfortable with the new medical software.
• Think about your hardware. The layout of your office will determine how many computers you need and where you need them. Computers in exam rooms help make entering patient information a faster process. However, make sure appropriate precautions are taken so only one patient’s records are shown at a time.
• Include past medical records in your new software. It may be tempting to simply store all your old records and start fresh with your new system. However, those old records are an integral part of each patient’s history and need to be readily accessed as a part of their complete medical records. Scanning software makes it easy to incorporate old records into the new paperless system.
• Utilize software integration features. Once your office has the basics of EHR management down, consider using integration features such as sending orders to third-party vendors, receiving results automatically or capturing missed charges automatically – all directly from your software.
• Always back up your data. Because electronic data can all too easily get lost or compromised, backing up your data is the most important thing you can do when going paperless. Having that back up is critical both for the wellbeing of your patients and for the efficiency of your practice.

Keep these tips in mind and your transition to paperless will go much more smoothly.